Alchemy in Psychology and Philosophy

Tim and I reviewed two recent papers—Dan McQuillan’s article on machinic Neoplatonism in data science and Bryan Norton’s essay linking Simondon to Novalis—using them as entry points to compare Simondon, Jung, Deleuze-Guattari, and the German Romantics, particularly Novalis. We outlined how Simondon’s concepts of individuation, information, metastability, and technical concretization draw directly on Jung’s alchemical schema. Simondon also inherits much from Novalis’ art of invention despite constructively criticizing Romantic habits of absolutizing the individual. We discussed Novalis’ “magical idealism” as an attempt to reconcile machinery, alchemy, and nature, suggesting that his figure of the “poet-engineer” prefigures today’s need to re-language AI and technology. I quoted frequently from Novalis’ Pollen. We emphasized that both biological organisms and technical objects only act within relational networks, aligning this with a relational or machinic animism. We agreed that entropy, death, and stochastic variation are not mere degeneration but the necessary fuel for ongoing evolution and collective individuation.